Welcome back, then, the Indian Premier League. As of Wednesday morning the IPL is among us again, busily re-establishing itself as cricket's whizziest, gaudiest pop-up western town of a sporting sideshow, not to mention – by its own figures – the second most lucrative sports competition of all time.

Yes, the IPL is back. And once again, like an annual rite of spring, I feel compelled to write an article about why you should like it. Here I am right now. Standing in front of you like a perpetually disappointed Viennese grandmother brandishing an untouched plate of Zwetschgenknodel.

Go on. Just try it. Like it. Like the IPL.

To date, much of the ingrained hostility has centred on two main objections. First, that the IPL is boring (also made up and not really cricket). And second that it has no real content, that Twenty20 cricket itself is less a sport more a series of unrelated actions skewered together and set to choruses of managed excitement, a contrived sport-style product that is basically background noise to the real business of selling cement, mobile phones and, above all, India's own boom-time 1950s Americana-style image of itself as a youthful, thrusting, gladiatorial nation.

And yet this year is surely different. You want broad sweeping context? We've got broad sweeping context. Surely only the most hardened sceptic could fail to be moved by IPL7's preloaded Dickensian-scale back story.

Already the IPL's chief nabob, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, head of the Board of Control for Cricket in India and the man alongside whom Giles Clarke planned to Clean Up The Finances of Cricket – while also effecting an oligarchical takedown of the ICC – has been ordered out of his post by the high court while corruption claims are investigated. The IPL's marquee name, MS Dhoni, has been distantly name-checked, but not implicated, in a spot-fixing probe.

Franchises have shuddered. Sponsors shied away and been freshly wooed.

County cricket may have its history, its sense of slow-burn Victorian grandeur, its stands spotted with sad, silent men carrying satchels full of spam sandwiches. But this is full-on real-life drama, in the shadow of which bats continue to swish, the money keeps rolling, the fireworks pop and IPL7 remains intoxicatingly convinced of its place at the centre of the sporting universe.

Even ITV4's new-season coverage has caught a sense of these wider forces at work, kicking off with an opening credit sequence that depicts a kind of cricket-based global apocalypse: stadiums consumed by fire, a frieze of giant-scale slogs and swipes, and finally a graphic that seems to show planet Earth itself spontaneously exploding with pure, boiling molten cricket.

As ever, though, the best bit is the in-house IPL commentary team, not so much pundits as simply blue-shirted BCCI evangelists. "WE ARE UNITED IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES!" Ravi Shastri fog-horned, weirdly, at the toss in the opening game, and most of the time it feels as though Shastri could be talking about his big toe – "Remarkable! Extraordinary! Superb!" – or a piece of cheese at the back of the refrigerator. It really doesn't matter as he is simply a continuous noise, an unwavering tone of relentless triumphalism, wearing on this occasion the expression of a man who has been kept in an underground facility for six weeks, subjected to flashing lights and pulsing noises and then finally prodded out into the desert air and encouraged to wander around with a microphone barking about tracer bullets and incredible spectacles.

And as the fireworks whizzed and Lasith Malinga set about producing those wondrous round-arm yorkers whereby he seems simply to reach out and place the ball on the batsman's toe, and as Robin Jackman yelled "It's a Yesbank six!" for the first time after some audible fumbling with his notes, it was hard to imagine why anybody could ever see anything but joy and heat and intrigue in any of this.

It must be said, the cricket's better these days too. Along with the Big Bash this is the best of Twenty20, played in the right conditions and with that all-star, all-sorts feel that suits this format best. I don't want to see team-building in Twenty20, or feel the long-term arc of some national setup at work. I want a glorious dolly mixture of a batting lineup, a semi-retired Australian great facing a 19-year-old mystery spinner while 40,000 delirious ultra-nationalists howl at each bottom-edged slog sweep as though witnessing an alien landing, or the spontaneous collapse of civilisation. There are still those who will maintain that Twenty20 is bad for Test cricket, the murder weapon with which it will be worn down, degraded and eventually dispatched. And yet against this, I offer you IPL superstar Virat Kohli, divinely handsome royal prince of the modern game and a player so beautifully orthodox in his drives and glides he appears to have been born parading his balletically cocked left elbow.

Not to mention David Warner, Mitchell Johnson and Cheteshwar Pujara, who seems sure to be a star of India's five-Test tour of England this summer, and who has flourished alongside but not inside Twenty20 cricket, emerging unscathed as the kind of batsman England would kill for, a player of gloriously rigid severity who approaches each innings like a 19th-century curate stonewalling his way to a moustache-quivering 17 not out on the local cauliflower patch.

Perhaps the final point of resistance to just giving in and liking the IPL is the sense that, for all its colour, it doesn't touch anything beyond its own gilded boundaries. And yet in many ways the IPL is already among us, already doing things to the way the sport is played and watched. ITV's viewing figures for the IPL final last year were almost 400,000, and this is the only cricket kids and casual fans can still stumble across.

Pop along to an inner-city district under-10 net session. They're not talking about Stuart Broad or Jimmy Anderson. They're batting like Dhoni, bowling doosras, pretending to be Malinga. It may be nuts, bonkers, low-grade at times, emotion wracked by noises off, but above all the IPL throbs with heat and life, not to mention a youthful and oddly alluring kind of hunger.